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What It Means to Be a Woman: Light Changes Everything

16 Monday Mar 2020

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Review: Light Changes Everything, by Nancy E. Turner
St. Martin’s, 2020. 290 pp. $28

Mary Pearl Prine isn’t your average seventeen-year-old. She can ride, shoot, and rope, which, in the Arizona Territory of 1907, would seem pretty usual, except that few other young women of her acquaintance can do likewise, or care to. Mary Pearl can also speak her mind — sometimes — and can draw, which sets her even further apart. What’s more, she dreams of being an artist, and against her mother’s wishes, enrolls in Wheaton College in Chicago to study art.

Just before she leaves, however, Aubrey Hannah, a handsome, moneyed, citified lawyer, proposes marriage. Having read Jane Austen, Mary Pearl has heard that a woman needs a wealthy husband to succeed in life. Though Aubrey’s shotgun approach to betrothal — grab and kiss, importune for the rest — puts her off, she’s physically attracted. Still, she has just enough gumption to ask him, by letter, to wait until she’s finished her two-year course of study.

But college upends Mary Pearl’s world. She’s never before been the butt of snobbish humor for her manners, speech, dress, or frontier skills, which quickly become legend around campus. But she learns valuable lessons about growing up, not least how to exercise her nascent gift for standing up for herself, especially when she feels she’s being treated as a second-class citizen, whether as a Westerner or a woman. Still, though she finds nice dresses and urban conveniences seductive, at root, she suspects the city and its ways:

What a wagonload of nonsense was life in this big city. Not a speck of interest in where their water came from, nor whether there was enough for their neighbors to eat. Just busy with doing things and having things I wouldn’t even know I didn’t have, which included crystal punch bowls and harp lessons.

Turner’s storytelling range in this coming-of-age novel includes betrayal, sexual and armed violence, the pain of longing, and hilarious situations. From the start, you sense Mary Pearl’s spirit and confusion about asserting herself, and I like how the author refuses to let her rush into choices she must make, given the familial and societal pressures she feels as a woman. You also understand where Mary Pearl gets her feminism, from her Aunt Sarah, who’s a real rip, and who can trade fire in words or bullets with anybody, male or female. From her, Mary Pearl has learned she has a place in the world, and she holds that thought tenaciously, even if she can’t always express it to others.

Whether in spoken word or contained thought, however, Mary Pearl’s voice lets fly. When Mama says that only hussies go to college, Mary Pearl reflects on her well-used, hand-me-down clothes, ratty workboots, and ragged sunbonnet, “hardly the picture of a fallen woman, unless a person meant she’d fallen down a mine shaft.” Witnessing her first (and probably last) ballet in Chicago, “it was embarrassing watching all those men and women tromping around in their tightest underwear and spinning and leaping with their legs and arms held out peculiar. I expected any second that someone would split their britches and all kinds of buck-naked silliness could follow, but it didn’t happen.”

I’d have preferred the villain of this piece to show more depth. He’s so completely odious, convinced of his power to buy whatever he wants and have everything his own way, that he’s cardboard. I believe what he does; it’s not that. I just want nuance to him, maybe a window on why he behaves that way.

At times in Light Changes Everything, I wonder whether Turner’s indulging in reverse snobbery, depicting her city folk as less caring or more prejudiced than country folk, to a point approaching caricature. Except close to the end, the city characters generally seem superficial, selfish, or small-minded, with motives so very different from Mary Pearl’s that neither she nor anybody else can really grasp them. Rather, I’d have liked to see her find more to respect in them and vice versa, however awkward the culture clash. The narrative seldom allows them to view her as more than a bauble or an entertaining object of conversation, whereas they appear to exist purely as foils, when they might have worth in their own right.

But Light Changes Everything has enough humor, strength, and pure delight to power through, and the novel makes an excellent coming-of-age story.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the publisher through my connection to Historical Novels Review.

Saving Your Life (and the World): The Lake on Fire

25 Monday Feb 2019

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Review: The Lake on Fire, by Rosellen Brown
Sarabande, 2018. 349 pp. $18

Why in the world is a group of Ruthenian Jews from Zhitomir trying to homestead in Wisconsin? That’s the question Chaya-Libbe Shadarowsky asks herself, and by the time she’s seventeen, in 1891, she’s come to a few conclusions. So when her parents pull her out of the school she loves, which has expanded her outlook and given her hope, and plan to marry her off within the community, she must make an excruciating choice.

Chaya loved her parents and felt their difficulties — her mother breathed for them, she was their pulsing machine. She admired her father for the dignity of his commitments. He was a man who bled for others, who ought to have been given a chance to work for the well-being of strangers. But they were living someone else’s life, she was certain of that. Driven to improve their chances, they had chosen wrong, and were covered with the dust of failing farmers. They seemed to attract catastrophe — the rain that soaked the hay before they got it in, the calf that strangled in the womb and could not be pulled out until its poor mother expired, the wind — so harsh it could not be measured — that took down the chimney pipe and let the rain flood in and soak the quilts and bother the babies. Each, if you traced it back a few steps, was the result of their incompetence.

She dreams of escape though she has no money, a struggling grasp of English, and no idea what she could do to keep body and soul together. But Chaya is nothing if not resourceful, and when she makes it to Chicago, her ten-year-old brother, Asher, unexpectedly tags along. His presence delights her, for she loves him more than anyone, yet also terrifies her, and not just because she now must support two people on invisible means. He’s ungovernable, and his impulsive nature, which seeks unfamiliar words and experience, renders him incapable of understanding obstacles, especially other people’s feelings or private property. Though Chaya worries he’ll be arrested for petty theft, the notion that her little brother might be a sociopath or harbor deep rage never occurs to her.

Both siblings bend their talents to social protest. Asher scrambles for a living as sneak thief and wunderkind and befriends the men building the World’s Columbian Exposition, due to open in 1893. With inequality visible on every corner, he becomes a political radical, whereas Chaya, committed to working within the system, crosses paths with Jane Addams and other social reformers from the higher classes. The juxtaposition poses the chief question of The Lake on Fire: Once you see oppression and suffering, how do you respond?

The novel explores several answers, each of which finds representation in a particular character or characters, achieving a universality in the particular. That’s not so unusual; more remarkable is how Brown proceeds with such subtlety that no one, ever, sounds like a talking head. The Lake on Fire therefore offers a primer on characterization, and it’s a demanding art. Brown takes her time, because she wants you to see everything she does and enter her narrative. This is what literary fiction aspires to, painstaking vividness that feels effortless. Readers who assume that portraying physical background, feelings, and character to such an extent must inevitably be highbrow or boring don’t know what they’re missing.

However, the unhurried approach works only because Brown constantly introduces the unexpected through the characters’ reactions, particularly to unforeseen intrusions that no one else would notice, but which mean the world to them. It could be a strange-looking dog on a railroad station platform, a manner of dress, the weather, an odor that carries particular associations, but they all spark a search for meaning and keep the reader close. Once or twice, I wanted the internal narrative to stop, and the external one to resume. But this wasn’t because the story bored me, only that I’d gotten the point, and the tension made me impatient.

More seriously, Asher gets under my skin in the wrong way. After a while, he becomes hard to like, and though I don’t demand liking in fiction, the reasons I dislike him — his self-absorption and lack of empathy — evaporate when it’s thematically inconvenient. If he’s unempathic in general, how does he wind up caring so much about the downtrodden men whom the city gobbles up and spits out? Chaya, usually so clear-eyed, seems to overlook or forgive her brother’s bad behavior on reflex and wonders why others can’t. Her stubbornness paints her (and the author) into a corner, the outlet from which strikes the only contrived note in the book.

Still, The Lake on Fire bowled me over, a splendid example of what literary fiction can be.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Cynical Kingdom: Chicago

21 Monday May 2018

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Review: Chicago, by David Mamet
HarperCollins, 2018. 338 pp. $27

“A romantic is just a cynic for whom, as yet, the nickel hasn’t dropped,” says one character to another. Both are newsmen from Chicago’s leading paper, philosophical drunks, and they may be excused their pessimism, for it’s 1925, when underworld gangs struggle for control of the city, and life seems cheap. But these facts are incidental, for this is Mamet land, where corruption pervades every interaction like poison, and the only question is who will succumb next.

The more interesting drunk in this peripatetic, loosely connected novel is Mike Hodge, decorated war veteran, who falls in love, hard, with Annie Walsh. But a thug kills her at Mike’s apartment, for no reason he can figure, and when he’s drunk enough of his visceral grief away, he sets out to find the killer.

Before that happens, however, a lot of hooch flows under the bridge. Though I salute Mamet for letting his protagonist mourn, when so many mysteries take bereavement for granted and have the sleuth pounding the pavement right away, Chicago errs in the other direction. So many conversations take place between Mike and his cynical friends, chiefly his newsroom buddy, Parlow, and an African-American whorehouse madam, Peekaboo, that when they tell him they’ve heard enough about “the Irish girl,” you want to agree. The sleuthing doesn’t start until around page 150, and doesn’t really get going until much later. On their own, many of these scenes work beautifully, especially with Peekaboo, whose take on life and manner of expressing it make her a compelling character. Why, she asks rhetorically, do you think girls fall in love? Her answer is that the man can (choose one or more): “bring me off; buy me shit; protect me and my children; leave me a lot of money.” On hearing this, Mike chuckles dismissively.

But if you didn’t know that Mamet is a playwright, you’d quickly wonder why there’s so much talk, and why every sentence seems to have at least one word in italics, as if the author were giving his players line readings. The staginess doesn’t end there, either, because the narrative has plenty of closeted two- or -threesomes and very few panoramas. Surprisingly, Annie herself appears very little and has no dialogue, except reported as indirect discourse, and even her name seldom occurs: She’s the “Irish girl.” Is she meant to be merely an abstraction? A sex object? It’s a little strange. And do reporters of the city beat really use words like etiolated or debate whether a certain aphorism comes from Tacitus? Maybe these reporters do, since they seem preternaturally attuned and can intuit that someone they’ve just set eyes on carries a shameful secret, and what it must be.

That said, Chicago has its pleasures beyond the rich, colloquial dialogue. Mike’s detective work, once he throws himself into it, is clever, persistent, and courageous. The mystery offers plenty of twists despite having few moving parts. Mamet has a keen sense of the underworld, its codes, gestures, and ways of operation. And though he doesn’t reveal the Tribune newsroom in full — it seems a fairly quiet place, with little furniture, population, or obstacles to private, uninterrupted conversation — he knows old-time newsmen:

Crouch was the city editor, and, like most men dedicated to a cause, he took seriously the signs and trappings of his devotion. These, in his case, were an ancient rumpled suit, a green eyeshade while at work, a Fatima cigarette perennially held between his lips, his eyes screwed up against the smoke, nicotine-stained fingers and teeth, a dirty shirt, and frayed and inkstained cuffs. He was small, usually unshaven, and had looked every day of his fifty-eight years since his accession to the desk in 1913.

But, in the end, Chicago doesn’t hang together as a novel, and I don’t think it would make much of a play, either. I’d hoped for better from a writer I admire.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the publisher via Historical Novels Review, in which this post was published in shorter, different form.

Scarred Lives: The Jazz Palace

04 Monday May 2015

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Review: The Jazz Palace, by Mary Morris
Doubleday, 2015. 245 pp. $26
It’s 1915, and Chicago’s South Side has its clubs where black musicians assume that the very few white patrons must be there to steal their secrets. But that’s not why young Benny Lehrman hangs around, using the money intended for his piano teacher to bribe his way past the door. Jazz, whose name Benny doesn’t even know at first, reaches him because it says everything the tongue-tied, soulful teenager can’t put into words.

Jazz speaks of loneliness bred in the bone, of having to drag yourself to a job you hate, of desire for the kindness, attention, and sympathy he can never have and believes he doesn’t deserve. Underlying his pain is a family tragedy: Several years before, his younger brother, the family favorite, died in a blizzard. Ever since, Benny has unfairly taken the blame.

However, the novel opens on a different catastrophe. Three of Pearl Chimbrova’s brothers die when the S.S. Eastland rolls over and sinks just after leaving the dock. Benny, who happens to be watching from the same footbridge as Pearl, dives into the water and tries to help, but the bodies he pulls out are already dead. Even without reading the jacket flap, you know Pearl and Benny will meet again.

S.S. Eastland, ca. 1911. (Detroit Publishing Co., Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons).

S.S. Eastland, ca. 1911. (Detroit Publishing Co., Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons).

Pearl’s mother never recovers, leaving her eldest daughter to pick up the pieces. As the years pass, Pearl takes over more and more responsibility for running the family saloon and mothering her younger sisters. Like Benny, she believes that she doesn’t deserve care or attention. Only routine keeps her going.

For Benny, it’s music, as he pursues learning jazz with a single-mindedness and energy he has never shown toward anything else. When he hears Napoleon Hill on trumpet, he knows why:

Everything he’d ever known about the world–that gravity holds you down and mothers are there when you get home, that baseball has nine innings, and sleep awaits you at the end of the day–was turned upside down. He forgot about his brother lost in the snow and the dead girl he’d danced with when the Eastland went down. . . . He even forgot he was a person in a crowd, not a very old person at that, just a boy. His arms and legs all melted into one. He wasn’t anywhere but inside the music he was hearing.

Napoleon and Benny, African-American and Jew, become close friends and musical partners, drawn together in part by vulnerability. With the advent of Prohibition, Pearl’s saloon has turned into a speakeasy, and Napoleon plays there from time to time, a great risk for a black man to take in a white neighborhood. Naturally, Benny sits in one night, but if you think you know the rest, you’ll have to read this book to see why Morris is too good a novelist to take the low road.

The Chimbrovas, the Lehrmans, Napoleon, every character in this book, even Al Capone, has been emotionally (if not physically) scarred. In this world of pain, in which warm currents drift through–sometimes within reach, sometimes not–there are no answers, only doing what you have to. But there are dreams, for those who dare, whether it’s just to be able to keep going, or to reach for something that might, one day, feel like happiness.

As I’ve said recently, I generally dislike novels about crossed paths, but The Jazz Palace nails it. I could explain that by saying that Morris opens up her characters’ inner lives, gets beneath their skins, and writes lyrically in the bargain. But it’s also that these people, like their creator, know they can’t afford cheap sentiment, and that whatever they want must be earned.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

A City Burned

26 Monday Jan 2015

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Review: Shall We Not Revenge, by D. M. Pirrone
Allium, 2014. 323 pp. $17

For most Chicagoans, the winter of 1872 means untold hardship. The Great Fire has ravaged the city, destroying thousands of homes and workplaces, and the shantytowns that spring up to house the destitute and jobless offer no comforts or hope. People do what they must to stay warm in bitter cold, make it through another day, and keep their families together. Relief is paltry and slow, but criminals may be found everywhere. Gang bosses know where there’s money to be made, often thanks to corrupt police, who look the other way for a cut of the take.

Chicagoans of all classes flee from the Great Fire. From Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, 28 October 1871. (Courtesy Chicago Historical Society)

Chicagoans of all classes flee from the Great Fire. From Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 28 October 1871. (Courtesy Chicago Historical Society)

It’s in this brutal, gritty atmosphere that someone has killed a rabbi in his synagogue, bashing in his head with one silver menorah and stealing another. Was the motive robbery? The rabbi was much loved in his struggling neighborhood for good works, so it’s unlikely that anyone held a grudge. Yet he was also engaged in secret activities that no one wishes to talk about.

Newly appointed detective Frank Hanley must solve the case, and he faces long odds. Even beyond the native distrust city residents have for Chicago’s finest or the immigrant population’s belief that police are oppressors, to the Jews mourning their beloved leader, Hanley’s an outsider, an Irish Catholic who couldn’t possibly understand their ways or respect them.

From this premise, Pirrone (a pseudonym) crafts an engrossing story that keeps twisting this way and that until the very end. It includes a growing attraction between Hanley and Rivka Kelmansky, the late rabbi’s daughter, who helps him gather clues and navigate the cultural shoals that threaten to swamp the investigation at every turn. I like how the author frames Jewish rituals and customs from Hanley’s perspective, and how his misperceptions of them sometimes lead him to the wrong conclusions. I also like how she describes the city, the poor, modern police procedure in its infant days, and the underworld that so often evades justice. The sense of time and place is so strong that it almost carries the narrative by itself.

 

He sighed and trudged down the sidewalk. The cold kept the planks from sinking into the frozen mud beneath and dampened the pervasive odors of moist lumber and rotting vegetables. The light was thin and gray, like the remnants of snow on the ground, and flurries swirled in the air. Not enough to cover the dirty snow-crust and muck, unfortunately. . . . He loathed winter . . . [e]specially now, with the city’s scorched bones still bared to the sky and the taste of smoke in the air.

What I disliked was how the author writes her characters. With few exceptions, they’re either all good or rotten to the core. Hanley in particular feels too good to be true, not least his rapid recovery from severe injuries. He’s always on the right side, without prejudices, a good boy who even washes the dinner dishes and treats all women with respect. His only flaw is a bad temper, but what o’ that? Likewise, his immediate boss has unshakable trust in Frank–a neophyte–which leads to interventions that feel contrived, at times. More nuanced portrayals would have given Pirrone even more tension than she achieves.

Her prose, vivid though it is in description, falters at emotional moments. Too often, the narrative tells what the characters feel, sometimes even to repeat what they’ve already shown.

That said, I enjoyed Shall We Not Revenge for the story and the setting, a historical background that I’d never read about.

Disclaimer: I borrowed my reading copy of this book from the public library.